“In our first granted patent report of the day we’ll show you Apple’s four winning hardware designs in addition to giving you a peek at one of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone e-wallet icons,” Purcher reports. “All of the design patent credits today include CEO Steve Jobs and VP Industrial Design Jonathan Ive.”

Purcher reports, “Apple has won a number of key design patents today, starting with their cool MacBook Pro [unibody design]… [and] for their iPhone 3G, iPod touch 2G and wireless keyboard.”

Read more, including Apple patent application illustrations along with their e-Wallet icon, in the full article here.

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13 Comments

Does Apple need an e-wallet icon to pull even more money out of my wallet? Like Mesmer and his swinging pendulum, Apple will bring out the e-wallet icon to mesmerize and hypnotize the Apple faithful into parting with their mazoolahs.

Not many people know that Jobs is actually very successful engineer/inventor with over two hundred of both won and applied patents where he is either primary inventor or co-inventor. Some time ago I succeed with adding this information into his Wikipedia page, so schoolers would be less ignorant about that than “tech pundits”.

It’s a race to the iWallet, more than you realize. Apple wants to beat Google to the punch and definitely WebOS which is already to introduce nfc data transfers this summer.

The icon is a sign that Apple is 100% on this. It’s just a timing thing. Will the iPhone need 4G to pull of the e-wallet? I think so. Otherwise the entire telecom system will clog up and really screw us up. Translation = within 18 months.

@ Cubert. considering the date of the original patent and the time prior to it actually writing the patent and setting the graphic figure, that’s not out of line at all. In fact, it shows you how long Apple has been secretly working on creating the e-wallet.

Jack Purcher altered my comment, and told me I was argumentative (in an email) when I noted the same thing about the icon. His edit changes the tone and content of my post completely. I merely made a simple observation, even less notable than Cubert’s post.

I might note that the patents were filed in summer 2010. If they wanted the icons to be accurate, they could have used the current icon, it wouldn’t have been a hard edit. All of the other icons are roughly current. The downward pointing arrow has never been used for iTunes, it has always been with musical notes.

There’s something weird about that iTunes icon … almost as though it was added later as an afterthought. You can’t have an icon (iTunes or any other) sitting alone in the lower-right corner of the screen. It would have moved over to the left next to the e-wallet icon.

These filing are just drawings in support of a patent application. This guy, Purcell, has made hay out of the existence of an icon that may or may not indicate anything at all.

However Apple may term it, e-wallet, ewallet, iwallet, whatever, they may never even release it as an app, or it may get released under a completely different name next week or next month.

Apple, as do other large companies, file patents to protect themselves from patent trolls coming in years later and trying to extort money from a successful product. None of this may ever see the light of day unless they get sued by some troll.

On the other hand, it could herald future plans that are not obvious from these drawings. Note that the icon for iTunes is nothing like any other icon ever used for it.

Could that mean that they are looking at an icon redesign for iTunes? Some people have said that it is needed, given the much larger role than just music that app now plays in the Apple ecosystem.

Only Apple knows for sure…

One is as likely as the other as far as the meaning of patent filings is concerned.

@ rwahrens. Are you saying that Apple isn’t going to participate in the iwallet market/revolution that’s coming? Have you seen the list of patents that support Apple’s extensive work on this? Are you a moron?

Apple will offer the consumer an iWallet (or whatever it’s called) when 4G is out. There’s absolutely no question about this rwahrens and a fkg iTunes logo has nothing to do with anything. Your mind is mentally hiccupping or something. It’s been a looooong time since I’ve heard a useless whiner yap about something that has nothing to do with the iWallet. In short, you’re a lonely loon. Go bother some other site.

Funny how people that use ad hominem attacks commonly exhibit the same problems they complain about.

My remarks are about PATENT APPLICATIONS, specifically the ones mentioned in this story, and how such things often do not result in products being brought to market. I never said that Apple wouldn’t market the app, I said just because they get a patent for something, it doesn’t guarantee that it WILL be marketed. The fact that Apple has been hiring engineers for that technology was not relevant to the subject at hand, which was a discussion between myself and Thomas, above, regarding the icons in the drawing.

If you could bother yourself to actually read and comprehend the posts, you’d see that, instead of going off half cocked and making a stupid personal attack.

Apple’s patent applications and the accompanying drawings often reveal interesting points to talk about that have little to do with the patent subject, and we were talking about something that caught both our notice.

And my remark isn’t on the other site because I told that moron that insists on moderating posts before posting them to take it off BECAUSE HE ALTERED MY POST WITHOUT MY PERMISSION to change the tone and content of the comment. Just removing it would not have been a problem, but he changed what I said, which was wrong and unethical. Which is why I told him to remove it.